Embodiments of the present invention relate to ontologies, and more specifically to techniques for automatically generating ontologies for enterprise applications.
Many enterprise applications today rely on the usage of Extensible Markup Language (XML) based data format to exchange and share information such as via the Internet. XML-based data formats that have been used for many enterprise applications may include XML Schema Definition (XSD), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP), and others. The use of these XML-based data formats, however, limits many enterprise applications to syntactic integration. This is due to a lack of semantic and relationship representation of enterprise data in XML-based documents since only the syntax and structure of data are defined in the XML-based documents. Accordingly, a different data format is needed to achieve semantic integration for enterprise data.
With the advent of semantic technologies, the importance of ontologies has grown manifold. An ontology is a formal representation of knowledge. An ontology is generally a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and relationships between the concepts. Ontologies are being used in several different areas including business analytics, enterprise systems, artificial intelligence and the like, and have the potential to be used in several other fields and applications.
An ontology is typically encoded using an ontology language. Several ontology languages are available. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) has become the industry standard for representing web ontologies. OWL can be used to explicitly represent the meaning of terms in vocabularies and the relationships between the terms. OWL thus provides facilities for expressing meaning and semantics that go far beyond the capabilities of XML-based data formats such as XSD, XML, WSRP, or WSDL. OWL is being developed by the Web Ontology Working Group as part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Semantic Web Activity. OWL is based on Resource Description Framework (RDF). Further information related to OWL and RDF may be found at the W3C website.
Ontologies are often generated manually. Such manual intervention is, however, both time consuming and error prone. On the other hand, conventional automation tools and methodologies that have been developed for generating ontologies do not meet the enterprise business needs. For example, many of these automation tools and methodologies cannot handle large amounts of enterprise data for generating large ontologies. Accordingly, existing implementations of these automation tools are generally limited to handling only a small amount of enterprise data, and often do not scale well when dealing with large amounts of enterprise data. Many of these tools also lack other desired features.